1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival

mccalli writes :"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much." Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.) Update: 03/03 19:38 GMT by T : That's "domesday" not "doomsday."

Comments

Long Now Project

[jonv]

Although more well know for its clock project the long now foundation is also looking at this problem.

I thought the original goal of the doomsday project was to allow every school in the UK to have a copy. So there should be a BBC Master hooked up to a laserdisc player in almost every school ?

Wow, this brings back memories

[TheBracket]

I remember when this was being compiled, and when my school first received one. We had a number of BBC micros and masters around the place, and I was the person they always called upon to set things up - then, as now, computers terrified a lot of people.

The Domesday Book on laserdisk was pretty neat; you could look up pertinent details for your local area, and it formed the basis of a lot of good history projects. IIRC, it had some primitive hypertext facilities.

I'm absolutely positive that this could be resurrected if needs-be. Enough copies of this went out to schools that finding a readable laserdisk shouldn't be a problem, and there has to be a working reader somewhere. I seem to remember that the data wasn't in any particularly obscure format, so mounting it on a BBC Master and sending it to a different machine shouldn't be too difficult.

If needs be, one could probably export the whole thing and mount it via a hacked BeebEm.

Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY

[Zachary Kessin]

Infact it did mean day of judgement, just not by G-d but by the King and his tax collectors. William the Bastard (AKA William of Normandy) had just taken over England, and he wanted to know what he had and more importantly how much it should pay in taxes. It historicly a very interesting document, and you probably can find large parts of it on the web. In both the original Latin and in Modern English.

The 1986 version was beautiful

[tbray]

There can't be many /.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.